1st Edition
Political Passions and Jungian Psychology Social and Political Activism in Analysis
In this book, a multidisciplinary and international selection of Jungian clinicians and academics discuss some of the most compelling issues in contemporary politics.
Presented in five parts, each chapter offers an in-depth and timely discussion on themes including migration, climate change, walls and boundaries, future developments, and the psyche. Taken together, the book presents an account of current thinking in their psychotherapeutic community as well as the role of practitioners in working with the results of racism, forced relocation, colonialism, and ecological damage.
Ultimately, this book encourages analysts, scholars, psychotherapists, sociologists, and students to actively engage in shaping current and future political, socio-economic, and cultural developments in this increasingly complex and challenging time.
About the Authors
Introduction: Why is Social and Political Activism Necessary for Psychological Understanding?
Stefano Carta and Emilija Kiehl
Section 1: Leaders, Led, Migration
1. Extinction Anxiety: Where the Spirit of the Depths Meets The Spirit of the Times
Thomas Singer
2. Relationship with authority: moving from helplessness towards experience of authorship
Gražina Gudaitė
3. Racial Awareness in Analysis: Philosophical, Ethical a Political Considerations
Antonio Karim Lanfranchi
Section 2: Ecological and Other Crises
4. When fathers are made absent by tortures, wars and migrations: clinical and symbolical perspectives
Tristan Troudart
5. The Garden of Heart and Soul: Working with Orphans in China – Symbolic and Clinical Reflections
Gao Lan and Heyong Shen
6. Think Big: Jung’s New Age Paradigm Shift Will Have An Ecological Framework
Dennis Merritt
Section 3: Migration, Refugees, Walls, Bridges
7. The Salience of Borders in the Experience of Refugees
Monica Luci
8. Getting on better with prejudice
Begum Maitra
Section 4: Histories and Futures
9. Environments of the Self, World Crises as Initiation, & the Telos of Collective Individuation
Scott Hyder
10. The Japanese Psyche Reflected in the Suppression and Transformation of ‘Hidden Christians’ in the Feudal Japan
Yasuhiro Tanaka
11. History, The Orphan of Our Time Or The Timeless Stories that make up History
Heba Zaphiriou- Zarifi
12. The Golem – Complex: From Prague to the Silicon Valley
Joerg Rasche
Section 5: Psyche in Political Context
13. Psychological Citizenship: A Problem of Interpretation
John Beebe
14. Learned Helplessness and Roma, the Most Marginalised of all Ethnic Groups in Europe
Heather Formaini
15. Nowhere to Go: The Limits of Therapeutic Practice
Ali Zarbafi
16. Catalyzing influences of immigrants for developing a multicultural perspective in psychotherapy training institutes
Lynn Alicia Franco
Biography
Stefano Carta is a Jungian analyst practising in Rome, Italy. He is professor of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology at the University of Cagliari, Italy, and a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and of the Associazione Italiana di Psicologia Analitica (AIPA), of which he was President for the 2002-2006 term.
Emilija Kiehl, Msc., is a Jungian analyst practising in London. She is Vice President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), former Chair of the British Jungian Analytic Association (BJAA), and a senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation (BPF).
"This book is a record of a various significant and stimulating contributions of Analytical Psychology to possible solutions for the social, political and cultural problems that have been affecting our world for centuries, such as immigration and suffering caused by war, poverty, racial, social and gender prejudices, environmental catastrophes, etc. Each chapter presents the psychotherapeutic point of view applied in areas of work outside the consulting room, thus overcoming the split between the inner and outer, personal and social aspects of life. It is a highly recommendable book not only for psychologists, who will see new ways of applying their work, but also those involved in other fields of knowledge, as well as general readers. All will find that psychology can bring new light to the understanding of social problems."
Toshio Kawai
President, International Association for Analytical Psychology
"This compilation of a selection of presentations from the third Analysis and Activism Conference held in Prague in December 2017, builds on and furthers the exploration of the vibrant, yet also very difficult and at times imperceptible, link between the psychological, the cultural, the social, the political and the ecological. Framed within a post-modern and archetypal perspective, the authors explore the often murky and less-than-obvious, yet crucial, link between the psychological and such diverse areas as migration and refugees, the environment, our perspective on history, and the political. Each presenter, in their own unique manner, seeks to break down walls of resistance and to build bridges to a wider and more inclusive perspective. What at first may seem like disparate and unrelated perspectives on this topic, in the end contribute to providing the reader with a kaleidoscopic perspective on the intricate, yet not so obvious, intimate relationship between these diverse topics and how the psychological is irrefutably embedded within and part of a wider matrix that necessarily includes the social and the political. The last article offers an example of how this can then be incorporated into the training of young analysts. As Jung succinctly stated, individuation does not take place in a bubble or in isolation, it is a process very much connected to the collective.
The publication of this book could not be more timely as the world finds itself in the midst of the current Covid-19 pandemic, a dramatic example of the interconnectedness these authors aim to bring to light and of the impact of social policy on the collective and on the psychological state of its citizens.
I highly recommend this book and am confident that readers will be nourished by the multiple perspectives provided and inspired to consider analysis and activism as allies and not as mutually exclusive fields of interest."
Tom Kelly
Co-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Analytical Psychology
